Anger and personal baggage fill humorous flight of fancy

Rage and a rambling self-narrative is a brutal barroom combination, best avoided on the page, too. But Miles is such a clever, amusing writer that he turns what should be a shtick into a terrifically fun read. The book's power begins with Benny's voice. Rascally, irate, over the hill but still looking for a final bright spot, he has a weakening cynic's dark magnetism. Even as the pages pile up, Benny knows his epistolary rebellion is futile. Getting angry, however, is even more pointless. "Even now," he writes, "in my maldesigned seat in this maldesigned airport, I spy a middle-aged woman waving her arms at the ticket counter like a sprinklerhead gone awry."

Rather than lower himself thusly, Benny decides to amuse himself on the page. Describing the complete and utter hash of his travel plans calls to mind another disaster: his life. He begins one riff after another on the airport and winds up ruminating on his 72-year-old mother, who lives with him in a state of partial paralysis in New York City, communicating via terse Post-it notes. He thinks about his imploded marriage, his scarred liver, his long-lost daughter, his abbreviated career as a poet, his even more irrelevant current work as a translator, and especially his long dead Polish father, who came to New Orleans just barely escaping the Holocaust.

Miles has done a beautiful job of moderating Benny's riffs and rants, so that we get to know him gradually, circularly, as one might do a loquacious town crank who tells good stories.

On one score, however, the novel falters. Throughout the book, Benny offers up sections of a novel he is translating from Polish into English called "The Free State of Trieste." The tale's story nicely dovetails with Benny's predicament - it's about a man looking for an ideal place to rest and to take stock. Only the novel within the novel never takes off. In this case, the shtick remains a shtick.